10 comments

  • bawolff 2 hours ago
    > Dolphin isn’t on iOS, because you can’t do JIT compilation on iOS....Well, Apple has one exception to its JIT restrictions: web browsers. JavaScriptCore, WebKit’s JS engine, uses JIT compilation for its higher-performance tiers. So, if a JS function is called enough times, eventually it’ll be optimised and compiled into native machine code. The same is true for WebAssembly.

    I was wondering about the why of the headline, and this is a really interesting answer. Such a beautiful way to get around restrictions. I wonder how applicable it is to other projects.

  • dag100 6 hours ago
    This is an incredible project for an undergraduate. Very impressive. Interesting to note that Firefox is 25% slower than Chrome/Safari, I wonder why.
    • tmpz22 6 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • simonw 5 hours ago
        I'd hire an undergraduate who can produce this level of work with Claude.
      • koolala 6 hours ago
        What are you basing this statement on? The code comments read very human to me. Your the one hurting their chances of finding a job by falsely saying this.
      • godwinson__4-8 6 hours ago
        Every company they apply to will be leveraging LLMs. Time to get over it. No need to be grumpy old man about such things. Every generation has faced such foes. The old always yields to the new.

        For the times they are a-changin'

        • agentultra 1 hour ago
          You can’t vibe code a production capable C compiler if you’ve never written one.

          Sure, companies are asking for LLM experience. But whether they know it or not they are also hiring someone who knows what they’re doing with the output.

          Projects like this are still worth doing by hand. I’d dare say it’s even enjoyable.

          • godwinson__4-8 38 minutes ago
            I don't disagree with you. I just don't think it's particularly charitable for a presumably seasoned developer to not only go out of their way to accuse some junior of using LLMs but then declare that this obviously makes them unemployable.
        • godwinsonsucks 3 hours ago
          [dead]
  • mikepurvis 3 hours ago
    I've always really enjoyed Andrew Kelley's article about trying to statically recompile NES code from 2013 [1]. Basically he makes a ton of progress but gets hung up not just on the realities of the handwritten assembler of the era just not being all that great at mapping to higher level LLVM IR. In the conclusion he specifically calls out a JIT-type methodology as probably being the way to go, where you live-recompile the hot paths when you have the runtime data required to actually understand them, and don't worry about the parts you can't.

    Very cool to see something like that in action.

    [1]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html

  • ahartmetz 5 hours ago
    Of course it beats a native interpreter. WASM overhead is about 20%, interpreter overhead is about 1000%.

    What's cool here is to have a GameBoy JIT runtime at all.

    • grashalm 4 hours ago
      It's two jits in total.
      • ahartmetz 1 hour ago
        True, but the WASM JIT is pretty low overhead because WASM seems to be a good design for what it needs to do. It's what I was referring to with the 20% overhead figure.
  • milch 6 hours ago
    Very interesting article. Would've been fun to see the comparison between native interpreter & JIT-on-WASM on iOS as well
  • jhatemyjob 1 hour ago
    The author's base assumption, and stated motivation for doing this project, is wrong.

    https://github.com/StephenDev0/StikDebug

    For an undergrad project, I suppose it's fine to conveniently forget about the existence of this solution for the sake of getting a good grade.

    • saagarjha 58 minutes ago
      I would not expect the average undergraduate to understand the intricacies of how iOS does dynamic codesigning enforcement. There are plenty of people who have graduated with advanced degrees and work at Apple who don't really understand how it works, either.
    • jrmg 1 hour ago
      It’s wrong ‘for sideloaded apps that have the get-task-allow entitlement.’

      It’s right for ‘regular’ apps.

  • jonny_eh 4 hours ago
    So it's a JIT-in-JIT? JiJIT?
  • lightedman 3 hours ago
    Still doesn't beat a natively-coded emulator. I got several that run faster on a 166MHz non-MMX Pentium than this emulator does on my Core Ultra i9.
  • bebenebenebeb 6 hours ago
    [dead]
  • iberator 6 hours ago
    yet on real old hardware it would be 20x slower in real life. same as all native javascript junk - its fast, but non usuable on older hardware
    • qweqwe14 4 hours ago
      Here's a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer.
      • rixed 3 hours ago
        How much RAM would a nickel buy me?
        • wifipunk 1 hour ago
          based on the tracked average of $12.65/gb from rampricesusa you could get about 4mb of ddr5
    • switchbak 5 hours ago
      Good thing I'm not running games on my 4gb Pentium 4 then.
      • jonhohle 2 hours ago
        Your code running on other people’s hardware is a privilege. Treat it with respect.
        • saagarjha 55 minutes ago
          You can also like not run the Gameboy emulator